Barefoot Running

I ran seven miles today, the last five of them barefoot.

Let me preface this post by saying:

1. I am not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV.
2. I am not compensated in any way by any shoe company (dammit)
3. These are my opinions and my experiences. Your mileage may vary.

I'm a 47 year old pack runner. I am better at short distances than long, but even in high school I was really a JV runner; I only ran varsity because we had a lousy track team. I have done several (eight? ten?) marathons, but haven't broken 4 hours since I was in my early 20s. Over the last ten years or so I've been running 5Ks and 2 mile races and even 800M races over the summer at the Club Northwest All-Comers meets.

But a couple of years ago when I was doing "just one more" 400M interval there was an audible pop behind my left knee. No warning, just a pop. Since then I have tried different ways to work around it. No long distance. Limited intervals. Never run two days in a row. Anything that would let me keep running, but nothing helped. Even weeks of rest at a time wouldn't fix it. Every time I ran I could feel it, just one tendon tightening up, but it was enough to shorten my stride and reduce my turnover. Running slowly didn't even work: any downhill at all, even the slightest grade would make me wince. It was frustrating and took the fun out of running.

Around Memorial Day last year I ran one 800M race. I broke 2:30, but I didn't feel good, and I gave it up. From June to December I ran maybe once or twice a month. Running was frustrating. It just wasn't worth it.

Now, last summer I read about the Vibram Five Fingers shoes and was smitten. All my running from July on was in a pair of KSOs. I wore them around in general. I've gone barefoot around the house for years and don't wear anything more formal than flip flops unless I really need to. It took a while to build up the strength in my feet and the outside of my calves, but it felt good.

The only real drawback to the Five Fingers is that because each toe has it's only little sack there are more friction points than with a traditional running shoe. That means more blisters, at least at the beginning, but for me that was a small price to pay, especially because the blisters quickly abated.

So I started running again on the 9th of January, a Saturday. I put on my Five Fingers and went down to the slough. There's a flat, paved trail that extends 5.5 miles south and 20+ miles to the north. I covered three miles, but only one of it was running. My calf tightened up, so I just walked.

This was my first good decision. I listened to my body. I wasn't running with a partner. I wasn't wearing a watch. I wasn't trying to pass people because my ego said I should be faster than them. I jogged slowly. When my calf tightened up, I pulled up and walked. I didn't force myself to jog to the next distance marker, I just stopped right there. Twice I made it a little less than half a mile. I walked the rest.

Sunday I did the same thing, but was able to run 2.5 out of the three miles.

Monday I jogged all 3 without stopping.

I ran every day for 8 days in a row. All slow. All flat. All paved. No watch. No pushing. I got my mileage up to 5 miles without stopping. When I felt good I picked up the pace. When I felt bad I slowed down to little more than a fast walk. Always listening to the body.

Excruciatingly slow people passed me. I let them go.

The most important thing was that I ran all 8 days with no pain. Some soreness, particularly in my calves because I hadn't been running, but that's the good soreness from awakening sleeping muscles, not pain. For the first time in years I was running without pain.

I took two days off. Then I started up again with 6 miles. Three days later 7. Three days later 8. Three days later 9. Then, because I missed a distance marker I pulled a Spinal Tap and went straight to 11 miles. Two days of eleven miles. 14 days in a row running. 112 miles. No pain.

Then I got my second pair of Five Fingers in the mail. The first pair was a little too small and the toes on my left foot were ripping the fabric. It didn't stop me from running, obviously, but eventually I want to go offroad into the hills, and I didn't want shoes with ripped toes because the rocks would get in, so I got a second pair, this one a size larger.

So on the 15th day I took off for another 11 mile run in my new shoes. Now, with traditional running shoes you don't normally do 11 miles on your first day, you give your feet a little time to get used to them first. But the Five Fingers are different, right.

Not really.

Maybe it was because they were a size larger, but I got a blister. It was nothing but a bloody, pulpy crater in my foot by the time I got done, but I could tell it had been a blister once. The thing that surprised me is that the blister was on the inside of my foot, on the arch, a part of the foot that doesn't even strike the ground. Still, I finished the 11 miles.

Yesterday: day 16. I put a huge band-aid over the raw flesh and ran again. After a couple of miles the endorphins kicked in and the pain in my foot subsided. In fact I felt really good, doing more than half the miles at a reasonably brisk pace (brisk by my new standards, anyway). Given the pain in my foot I was very pleased with the run. Much better than the day before. 134 miles in 16 days. Running 24 out of 26 days. Even with the sore on my foot I was feeling pretty good.

Then I went down to the trail today. I covered the sore with another band-aid and started down the trail, but after more than two miles one thing was clear: the pain wasn't going to stop today. I felt really good otherwise, but that rubbing on my foot was more than a distraction. For the first time in almost a month I pulled up and stopped in the middle of my run.

I took the shoes off. There was some bleeding, but no worse than yesterday. But yesterday it stopped hurting, today it didn't. So I started walking back.

I had heard of barefoot running, and last week I happened to read Born to Run, which talked about Barefoot Ted, amongst other people. I knew my feet had been toughening up from running in the Five Fingers anyway, so when I got to the 3.5 mile marker I just started jogging.

If there is one thing that feels better than running in Five Fingers shoes, it's running without them.

Yeah, I still had the sore on my foot, but like I said, it's not on a part of the foot that hits the ground. It felt good. I started to pick up the pace. It felt even better. It felt so good that when I got back to the 5.5 mile marker I just kept running. Past 6, 6.5, and finally turned around at 7 and it felt like I just kept going faster until somewhere between 6.5 and 6 I slowed to cool down into the finish at 5.5.

My feet were dirty, but I felt really good. It was so much easier than running even in the Five Fingers. I didn't have to compensate for the shoes at all.

I found my own stride.

Tomorrow I'll run again. This time I'll go barefoot from the start so I don't have to carry the shoes with me. If I do 10 miles I will have my first 70 mile week in more than 25 years. If not, maybe I'll get 70 miles next week.

It doesn't really matter, though.

The important thing is that I've been running pain free for a month now. I've done it by not worrying about any goals except mileage. I've done it without rest days. I've done it without relying on fancy shoes, and I may finish it without any shoes at all.

A month ago I couldn't run even one mile without stopping. I ran seven miles today, the last five of them barefoot, and I can't remember enjoying running as much as I'm enjoying it right now.

False Friends

Swedish speakers leave the room, this is not for you.

Browsing through The Local, an English-language Swedish news site I ran across an article covering a viral video that provides a brief and humorous introduction to Swedish for English speakers. (Don't ask me why I was browsing a Swedish news site, it's just what I do, okay?)

Warning: the language is a little coarse, so if you are easily offended you probably shouldn't play it.

My favorite little phrase from the article is: It’s not the fart that kills, it’s the smäll. For those of you who don't speak Swedish (and that should be all of you because I sent the Swedish speakers out of the room), this is funny because it combines two Swedish/English false friends* to make a reasonably meaningful sentence. The word "fart" in Swedish means "speed", and "smäll" (pronounced like the English "smell"), means impact. So if you translate the words, the sentence becomes "It's not the speed that kills, it's the impact," which still makes sense. I think it's a nifty little double meaning for those in the know (which now includes you - welcome to the club).

Other Swedish/English false friends include:

bra - fine, well, good
ful - ugly
full - drunk
kissa - to pee
hamstring - hoarding

Notice how much funnier false friends are when they mistakenly include scatological and anatomically sensitive terms. Somehow it seems a part of us will always be stuck in third grade.

The BBC website has several false friend examples for English (if you can really call British English "English") and other languages. There are also several websites for false friends, just search for "false friend" plus the language pair you're looking for ("false friend English Spanish").

A classic for written French is chat, which means to talk in English, but means "cat" in French, and in spoken French the English word "shovel" can easily be confused with "cheval", the French word for horse. With a little work you can find French/English false friends that don't involve French animal names.

And for those of you who like word play, here is an old Two Ronnies sketch about learning Swedish, except that there's no Swedish involved and Corbett is dressed in German lederhosen.

 *a false friend is a word that sounds like a word in another language but has a different meaning. I thought that's what false cognates were, but in reading about such word pairs today I have become enlightened. Shame, really, because I always felt that saying "false cognate" made me look taller.

Sources:
The Local
BBC
Transparent Language
Spidra

Promotion Fail

You make it all the way through Friday the 13th and then this crap happens.

"Mailorama va distribuer des dizaines de milliers d'Euros en cash dans les rues de Paris," claims the Mailorama.fr website - at least for the moment. For the monolithically English speaking, that roughly translates to "Mailorama will distribute tens of thousands of euros in cash in the streets of Paris." Didn't work out that way.

Mailorama, an email marketing website in France, set out to promote their service by having a drive-by-giveaway, tossing envelopes of cash to people from a van as it passed the Eiffel Tower. However when an unexpectedly large crowd estimated at 5000 showed up, blocking traffic and causing safety concerns, police and  Mailorama agreed to call off the publicity stunt.

The disappointed crowd overturned a car. At least 10 people were arrested.

The Mailorama fiasco is right up there with other great promotional disasters. My favorites are the (real) Disco Demolition night and the (fake) WKRP Thanksgiving Giveaway.

Disco Demolition night took place in Chicago in 1979. Disco music, the signature music of the 70's, had divided the nation into those who could do The Hustle and those who couldn't. A growing rejection of what had become the Disco norm was spawning the New Wave and Punk movements, and in Chicago a disc jockey expressed his disdain for Disco by destroying Disco records by any means possible. His claim to fame came when he was scheduled to blow up boxes of LPs between games of a Chicago White Sox double-header.

The White Sox were owned by Bill Veeck, a shameless promoter who had once sent midget Eddie Gaedel up to bat in a major league baseball game. For him the Disco Demolition night was a no-brainer.

The demolition took place, but then, as with the Mailorama crowd, the scene turned ugly with hundreds of people coming onto the field and starting a bonfire in center field. The second game of the double header was cancelled (the White Sox ultimately forfeited the game - the last time an American League game was forfeited).

Still, IMHO, the best promotion failure was from the fictional WKRP radio station from the TV series of the same name. If you know the story it needs no explanation, and if you haven't, well, I won't spoil it for you, just watch the clip (sorry, can't find an embeddable version).

Sources:
CBS News
Mailorama

Not What They Seem

Austrian Times
Police close down the Alesso family bakery in Turin, Italy.

Two bakers in Turin, Italy have been arrested for selling cocaine hidden inside loaves of bread. Michelangelo Alesso, 51 and Alessandro Mancino, 22, have been arrested and their family bakery shut down. Alesso blamed the economy for their desperate measure: "I had no choice. No-one was buying special bread or cakes any more so we had to find something they would buy or we would be out of business."

Police became suspicious when the bakery line began to reach around the corner.

---

Austrian Times

Confiscated cigarettes with (bonus!) rabbit droppings in the Canary Islands.

Also, counterfeit cigarettes confiscated in the Canary Islands have been found to contain not only tobacco, but also rabbit feces.

Police and customs officials have arrested at least 12 people on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary islands with a population roughly the size of Oahu, Hawaii.  The rabbit feces were used to save on tobacco content. The police seized 1.5 million packs of cigarettes and over a million Euros in cash.

According to one customs official, "They stunk. They smell just as you'd imagine burning shit to smell."

Sources:
Austrian Times (and again)
Memo
Daily Express
Tenerife Forum
Island Connections
Wikipedia

NewsCorp v Google

Several news sources report that News Corp, run by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, may pull their stories from Google in a matter of months.

Most of those sources seem to be (or cite) articles published in News Corp properties.

I found those sources using a Google search.

For those of you who haven't been in touch with this issue, the general background goes something like this:

1. Media sites are trying to make money on the web.
2. Web revenue comes primarily from advertising.
3. Google currently has the largest income from web advertising.
4. Content providers (like News Corp), feel that Google (and other search engines) are unfairly using their content and want to them to pay for it.
5. Google says, no, thanks, we don't want to pay.

So now News Corp is threatening to pull its news off of Google. They also have a self-imposed deadline to put all their sites behind paywalls by June 2010.

Ain't gonna happen.

The reason I am sure they won't pull their Google listings is because if they wanted to they could do it not in a few months, but today. Right now. In less time than it takes to read this article.

There is a convention used by all search engines to respect sites that don't want to be searched. You do it by adding a file (robots.txt) to your website. You want to stop all the search engines from searching your site? Put these two lines in robots.txt and it's done:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If it's so simple then why doesn't News Corp do it?

They don't do it because they need Google more than Google needs them.

News Corp has a tremendous number of print holdings around the world, including The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), The New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Of these four, all a completely free to read with the exception of the The Wall Street Journal.

Up to the 19th century, print media was a natural oligopoly on the news. If you lived somewhere most of your second-hand news came from the local papers. You didn't have a choice. You couldn't very well subscribe to the New York Times if you lived in Chicago. Because papers are regional by their very nature they are also limited in the number of potential subscribers. Subscriptions eventually topped out, but newspapers really turned into a business when they realized they could make more money by advertising than subscriptions. In fact, advertising revenue is the prime source of income for most newspapers today.

Don't agree? Do you get a local town or neighborhood weekly newspaper? Do you pay for it? I get one in delivered to my house every week for free. It's paid for by the advertising.

Even if you pay a fee for a daily paper it probably doesn't cover the cost of production and delivery.

Newspapers are not in the news business, they are in the advertising business. They make money by providing a service, and the service is providing eyeballs for advertising. News is what they use to attract the eyeballs.

When you look at newspapers as an advertising service you see why they feel threatened by Google (or any other search engine). Google provides the same type of service in that they connect eyeballs to advertising, and they do it at a far more massive scale than a print newspaper could ever achieve.

Newspapers are threatened by this and rationalize it by claiming it is unfair that Google makes money off of their news content.

They are wrong in two fundamental ways: first, the service Google provides is a service which is not provided by the newspapers, and second, individual news sites provide very little original content.

First, newspapers have gone online to attract more eyeballs, and Google's search engine increases those eyeballs.

Consider the dictionary. A dictionary has a phonetic pronunciation for the word which can be handy if you see a word written down but have never heard it spoken. However, if you need to know how to spell a word a dictionary is pretty useless. But what if someone created a dictionary sorted phonetically? Then you could take a spoken word and find the correct spelling (or spellings, when there are homonyms).

Google provides a service analogous for news sites analogous to the phonetically sorted dictionary. If someone just wants to see what the news is they can go directly to their news site of choice, but if they want news on a specific event then Google provides a mechanism to point their eyeballs at a relevant news site.

Google does not charge for providing this service. Google absorbs the technology costs for providing this service the same way newspapers absorb production and delivery costs, and both make their money back in advertising.

Now, some news sites do not need Google. They attract readers enough readers by reputation alone.

Of Alexa's top 100 global sites, only two are news sites: CNN and The New York Times. A search on "Fort Hood shootings", a fairly hot topic this week shows CNN at the top of the list, but the New York Times isn't even on the first page.

Though the NYT doesn't charge for an online subscription, it does require user registration. This means that if you're not registered you can't read the articles. Because not everyone is registered the links on the NYT are frustrating to pass around - a lot of people can't click through - so links to NYT articles don't get ranked as high on Google. The NYT has a strong reputation, they can get by without Google, but how many other news sites can do that?

The NYT is 97th on the list. CNN is 59th. I can't say how much larger the NYT audience would be if it's articles showed up on Google, but I don't see CNN rushing to put up a barrier between themselves and those eyeballs.

Google provides a service, and the market has deemed that service valuable enough that Google can support the costs of that service by advertising.

The second thing is content: news is, by its nature, a local event. An event may have worldwide implications, but the bottom line is that news is an event that occurred in some specific location. No newspaper can cover the entire world, so they take advantage of wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press as a source for non-local news stories. Many of these wire service news stories are replicated in newspapers around the world. Not just major stories, either.

Anyone who has read through my blog knows I like to pull up odd news stories, and I am amazed how difficult it is to find differing sources because so many of the stories are replicated word for word. While I often find out about a story from a source that uses the wire service, I also try to find the original story. The wire services almost never site the original source for the story (interesting double standard, but I digress), but Google often allows me to get back to the original sources.

(And before you go off on piracy and copyright tangents, note I am only talking about news sites that actually pay for the right to print the wire service articles, okay?)

Take a look at your local daily and see how many of the articles are wire service articles, especially in the front and sport sections. This does not mean that the newspaper is useless - far from it: using wire services is a cost-effective way to enhance news coverage. But the transition from print to online makes wire service stories significantly less valuable because you can find the same story in so many places. Local news makes a news site valuable. Interpreting the implications of a non-local event on the local area makes a news site valuable. Running a wire service story does not make a news site valuable; this is a fundamental difference between print and online news.

Running wire service articles doesn't hurt an online news site, but because the article is replicated all over the world, it doesn't make the site more valuable either. The valuable content is the original content, not the wire service articles.

Now, the internet has drastically changed the game over the last few years. A large portion of  newspaper advertising used to be for classified ads, but craigslist, ebay, and monster.com have (from the newspaper point of view) devastated that market. The eyeballs and the money associated with classified ads has left the newspaper coffers and will not be back.

The situation with Google is fundamentally different. Google does not remove money from online news sites. Online sites still have their own advertising. All Google does is drive more eyeballs to that advertising. And Google does it free of charge. And that is why News Corp will not pull themselves from Google.

What if News Corp does pull its sites from Google? Like I said, of Alexa's top 100 sites, none of them are News Corp properties. What do you think the impact on Google will be?

Murdoch understands all of this.

So I say it again: ain't gonna happen because if it were going to happen News Corp would already have done it.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Telegraph
RobotShop

Anteaters Ain't Aardvarks

Aardvarks never killed anybody. - The Goon Show

The aardvark is not the same animal as the anteater. - Sid

Anteater! Run for your lives! - Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief

Zoo de Florencio Varela
The Florencio Varela Zoo runs a conservation project for the giant anteater.

Schadenfreude reared its ugly head (and I believe "ugly head" is truly accurate here), when an Argentine zookeeper at the Zoo de Florencio Varela was killed by a giant anteater.

Related to the sloth (but not to the aardvark), the giant anteater is an endangered species native to South America. The Florencio Varela Zoo, located outside of Buenos Aires, is a part of an international cooperative conservation and breeding effort to save the animals.

The toothless animals grow to as much as 9 feet long and can weigh in excess of 100 pounds. Though generally not a danger to humans, when threatened or protecting their young they can attack with their large front claws.

The zookeeper, 19 year old Melissa Casco, died post-operatively after sustaining wounds to her legs and abdomen.

Sources:
All Voices
Courier Mail
Zoo Chat
Zoo de Florencio Varela

Pole in the Highway

There is a utility pole in the middle of a six-lane highway in Zhengzhou, China.

Looking like something out of Brazil or The Hitchhiker's Guide, the utility pole used to stand by the side of the road, but sits in the middle of the recently widened thoroughfare.

Unfortunately, there is not enough money to bury the power lines, so the pole cannot be moved.

The pole remains unmarked, but there was enough money for road signs directing traffic forward (into the pole) at 50 mph.

Source:
Ananova

Who Are You?

Where there is demand can supply be far behind?

As fingerprint scanners replace traditional card readers for clocking in and out at companies in China, the motivation to get around the fingerprint ID has increased. A Chinese company (unnamed in the Croatian Times article), takes your fingerprints by mail and for about $15, will send you back a silica gel replica of your fingertips. Says customer Xiao Liu:

We're fined 20 GBP every time we're late and I used to ask a friend to punch me in until my bosses switched to fingerprints. Now I've just given some copies of my fingerprints to people on the early shift and I'm never late no matter what time I get up.

This opens the door to people actually stealing your fingerprints, just like in the movies. I suppose that if fingerprint theft became prevalent then another company would pop up offering some medical procedure to modify your prints. It's all about supply and demand.

And in Austria, funeral company Bestattung Wien now offers amulets containing fingerprints of the deceased in addition to more traditional offering like death masks and diamonds made from the ashes of the deceased.

Of course you can see the biometric issues popping up here: take fingerprints of the dead, send them to the Chinese company and voila, now they can continue to punch into their job (and draw a paycheck) long after a normal body would be retired, memorialized and buried. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.

Sources:
Croatian Times (photo)
Austrian Times (photo)

Confounded by Meep

Once the sole property of animated roadrunners and scientific muppets, meep has entered the American vernacular.

I am always fascinated by the ways language changes over time, and I don't think any language is more malleable than English. Every generation comes up with its new slang, of course. Some of it sticks: cool has been around for a while now and doesn't show any signs of disappearing. Bling, rad, and gnarly, on the other hand, have not fared so well and are more tied to their times.

When I was growing up my brother and his friends were fond of the term moons. Initially it meant something like "a long time," a play on American Indian movie speech patterns like "I a have not seen your face in many moons." In time came to mean anything long or large or in vast quantities. "Moons good" would mean very good. The word had one universal meaning, but they co-opted the word and morphed it and used it in ways it hadn't been used before. It was a form of play, like hide-and-seek or soccer.

Although moons was never universally adopted by my generation, it was useful within that group because there was a general agreement on its meaning. It is that agreement between users that differentiates language from just so much grunting (or hand-waving, if you're an ASL speaker).

Meep entered the world under my radar (I'm still trying to get a handle on meh). It is still new enough that there is not a universal agreement as to its meaning. Judging from the Urban Dictionary entries the term started gaining traction in 2003.

The most popular entry in the Urban Dictionary defines it as:

The most versatile word in the English language, or in fact any language!

Can mean whatever you want it to mean, but the most popular uses are: 

1. An exclamation akin to 'ouch' or 'uh oh..' 
2. Filling in the blanks where other (rude) words would go. 
3. A greeting! I personally say meep instead of Hello... 
4. A random expression of happiness used to fill gaps in conversation. 

I only got wind of meep today when I followed a link to this article in The Salem News that said in part:

Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word "meep" at school, they could face suspension.

A pretty strong statement, in my opinion. Said the principal:

"It's really not about the word in particular," Murray said. "The reason for the message (was) a group of students were instructed to refrain from that language and other language in a particular part of the building."

"It has nothing to do with the word," [Principal] Murray said. "It has to do with the conduct of the students. We wouldn't just ban a word just to ban a word."

I thought the article was fairly interesting, but nothing to blog about, so I just posted a link to it on my Twitter account with the text "meep meep". It turned out to be the most popular link I've posted this month, and I was not the only one linking to the article, so I changed my mind: apparently it is interesting to some people.

And what about the kids at Danvers High?

Some Danvers High students said yesterday they were not sure what "meep" means.

"No one really knows," said sophomore Melanie Crane, who said some freshmen used the term, but she has not heard the term used herself.

Other students outside Danvers High who declined to give their names said they got the phone message from Murray saying they risked suspension if they uttered the word.

They said the term is meaningless, comes from the Muppet Beaker or is a sound Japanese anime characters make.

The kids are certainly wrong about one thing, the term is certainly not meaningless. It means something to them. It means something to their principal. That meaning is the essence of language.


I'm not sure how effective Principal Murray's actions will be in the long run. The largest of the three Facebook Meep groups has grown by more than 10% today. For those of a certain age the whole affair recalls the language humor in George Carlin's Seven Words[NSFW], Monty Python's Knights Who Say Ni, or Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry's Your Name Sir.


Meep is just a sound. We imbue that sound with meaning and make it a word. And in spite of what the Urban Dictionary says, meep is not even the most versatile four letter word in the English language[NSFW].

It will be interesting to see if meep becomes cool or fades into the groovy linguistic ether.

Sources:
Urban Dictionary
The Salem News

Throwing Money at the Problem

Ran across this graphic today on the rate of return states get from the money they spend on education as measured by high school graduation rates. (Click through to see the a larger version.)

High school graduation is an important indicator of later financial success, with high school graduates earning $14,000 more annually than high school dropouts.

The first thing I noticed is that this is a really, really bad graphic representation of the data. What do you get from looking at this picture? Not much. There is no order, there is no representation of magnitude. Just not very effective, so I shoved the numbers from the graphic into a spreadsheet and got something a little more interesting.

Now in this graph you get a better feel for the data. The x-axis (on the bottom) is the amount each state spends per student, and the y-axis is the high school graduation rate.

You can click on the graph for a larger image - but the actual numbers are not particularly interesting. What is interesting is the randomness of the data. And why is randomness interesting? Because if spending more money on education was related to high school graduation rates you would expect the points to start in the lower left corner and move up to the upper right corner. The randomness of the points indicates the stunning lack of correlation between spending and graduation rates.

Those three points way out to the right are (from top to bottom), New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. All three spend over $12,000 per child annually, but get extraordinarily different graduation results.

For those of you interested in geeky numbers, r-squared for a linear regression is 0.0373, and even for a six-degree polynomial regression (remember, there are only 51 points), the r-squared only gets to 0.2191. How low a correlation is that? If you try to correlate the first letter of the state (a pretty random value) with the graduation rate the linear r-squared is 0.0873, more than twice as high as the r-squared for dollars per student. That is a stunning lack of correlation.

Now, there are huge problems with compressing the entire education system down to two numbers. It ignores any quality factors like what the actual graduation requirements are (some states will have more demanding graduation requirements), and also what each state considers a student (are special education students included in both figures, or incarcerated youths, or students in private schools), so it's easy to quibble and get defensive on a case-by-case basis. You could also argue these figures should be weighted in importance based on population size (which these figures are not). No question that there are some apples and oranges comparisons.

What is clear in spite of those differences is that money alone does not fix the education system. Money, is probably not even the primary factor in educational success. Utah and Colorado have identical graduation rates, but Utah spends $2400 less per student. How does that happen? New York spends almost twice as much as Texas, but has a lower graduation rate. How does that happen?

Education is not a simple problem and, as this data shows, it does not have a simple answer, not even money.

Source:
Good
eHow